More than 20 years ago, when I was living in Washington DC and went on a course to give up smoking, one of the recommended therapies was wrapping your cigarette packet in plain paper so you couldn't see the name of the brand. Oddly enough, this helped. I hadn't realised until then how big a part the brand had played in my addiction; how much I was in thrall to the reassuring authority of the handsome Rothmans logo. Now, having decided that cigarettes should be taken off display in shops and kept under the counter, the government appears to be edging towards a ruling that they should also be sold only in plain packets.

This may well have the desired effect of causing more people to quit, but it also raises a few questions. Why does a trade that is perfectly legal have to be conducted furtively? Why should the makers of a legal product be forbidden to promote it or engage in the open competition for sales that all other manufacturers enjoy? And, if cigarettes are to receive such discriminatory treatment, what about alcohol, which has even more deleterious social effects? It will be annoying enough not knowing what kind of cigarettes you are buying, whether they be French or Turkish, plain or menthol; to have all types of alcoholic drink in the same unlabelled bottles would bring chaos. Neither producers nor customers would respond kindly to great wine vintages being put in the same kind of bottles as cheap cider or alcopops.

If tobacco is poisonous and life-threatening, why is it on sale at all? It should be as hard to come by as cyanide or arsenic. Perhaps in the end it will be, and we will only be able to see cigarettes in the theatre, in movies and when Kate Moss is on the catwalk on No Smoking Day. They will be a symbol not of elegance or sophistication, as they once were, but of degeneracy and self-destruction, and they will doubtless be all the more glamorous for that. In the National Theatre's latest production of Hamlet, even the Prince of Denmark is made to smoke, presumably to show that he is deranged. I expect we will see a lot more smoking on the stage in future, used to indicate villainy or mental disorder.

Ill-conceived praise for Andrew

Prince Andrew is not a person whom it is easy to rally around, but I am beginning to feel just a little bit sorry for him. The spectacle of Fleet Street newspapers acting together as a lynch mob is not edifying, and the prince has been particularly unfortunate in his supporters. He could have done without his wayward ex-wife crediting him with a saintliness that would have seemed implausible even for Mother Teresa. And as for the billionairess from Kazakhstan, Goga Ashkenazi, it was unhelpful of her to say anything about him of any kind, least of all that he was very, very worried about losing his position as British trade ambassador, that he was doing a great job for Britain, and that his personal extravagance was as nothing compared with that of Silvio Berlusconi.

"If you think Andrew is extravagant, you should see Berlusconi's set-up in Sardinia," she said in an interview with the London Evening Standard. "You're having dinner, and he swings his hand, and on the hill above his vast estate a volcano starts erupting. It is some sort of electronic thing." Cherie Blair was similarly impressed when she and Tony stayed there with the Italian prime minister in 2004. "I have never had an evening like the one I had in Sardinia," she told an Italian magazine. "Fireworks lit up the words 'Viva Tony', and we all sang Summertime together." The mind boggles. But it is perplexing that even a Kazakh, unfamiliar with Britain's expectations of its royal family, should think it to Prince Andrew's credit that he is less extravagant than one of the richest men and biggest show-offs in Europe.

I also feel sorry for Prince Andrew that whatever he does, he does it without payment. As the late Jimmy Goldsmith said in 1979 when he hired journalists on inflated salaries to join his short-lived news magazine Now: "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." If you pay nothing, I don't know what you get, but it's not likely to be very good. And it seems a particularly bad idea to pay nothing to a prince with financial problems for the specific purpose of making him consort with some of the richest and most corrupt people in the world. But that, I'm afraid, is about as far as my pity for His Royal Highness goes.

Birds have feelings too

My late mother used to give her chickens names and carry on conversations with them in their pen. She certainly believed that they had emotional intelligence, but she may just have been a victim of the widespread, deluded tendency to attribute human feelings to creatures of every kind, except perhaps those that bite or sting. New research claims to show that chickens can feel the pain of other chickens, maintaining that this is the first time scientists have discovered empathy in a bird. If that is so, then the keeping of chickens in battery farms is even more scandalously cruel than I had imagined.

Ed Balls orders a latte

I was sitting the other day in a cafe at Milton Keynes railway station, drinking a cup of coffee, when I looked up to see Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, standing at the counter. "One decaf soya latte with no sugar," he ordered in a commanding voice. What, I wondered, had happened to the people's party if this bruiser of the old school was planning to consume such a pallid, health-protecting, politically correct libation? I was greatly relieved to discover that he wasn't buying it for himself but for the highly respectable-looking woman assistant who was travelling with him.